Some ideas can help with the household chores

June 9, 2013

Friends are friends. Emails are emails. And friends with emails produce information you may never have thought of otherwise.

One of the latest missives from my friend Janet Schiltz out in Arizona provides a number of ideas for helping out around the home. It might have been easier explaining some of them using photos, but since that's not possible, you'll just have to think about it.

Ideas such as:

Take an old CD spindle and turn it into a bagel tote. It would look like a mini covered cake pan.

Freeze green grapes to chill white wine without watering it down.

Put a wooden spoon across the top of a boiling pot of water to keep it from boiling over.

Good sandwich guide: Instead of overlapping two pieces of lunch meat, cut both in half and lay the flat edges next to the edges of the bread. That way, all parts of the bread are covered with lunch meat.

Turn on the seat warmer in your car to keep the pizza warm while driving home.

For an inexpensive cookbook holder, use a pants hanger and hang it from the cupboard door handle.

Doritos are great for kindling in a campfire if you can't find any wood.

Use a muffin tin to serve condiments at a barbecue. This also helps cut down on dishwashing.

Put pancake mix in a clean ketchup bottle for a no-drip experience. (Likely, you could mix it up before going camping and just shake it thoroughly before using.)

Hold Oreos with a fork stuck into the cream so your fingers don't get messy when dunking the cookie in milk. Which is a good idea, but then you wouldn't get to lick the dripping milk off your fingers. See, there's always a downside.

This kind of list always makes me wonder who has the time, or even the inclination, to collect such information and pass it around to others.

Now, if I were making a list of helpful ideas, first on that list would be to find some other person willing to do all that stuff for you while you sit and read.